Over the past few days I've been wading my way through the new Tom Waits album, Orphans. Wading, because it's a three CD set - perhaps on the basis that anyone with a taste for Waits will find a triple helping three times as delicious. "What's your problem?" listeners wanted to know, when I moaned about this on air last night. "It's like a box of chocolates - you don't have to eat it all at once."

Well, no it isn't. It's actually like serving your dinner guests a 54-course meal using every last ingredient in the kitchen, from yesterday's lettuce to that can of artichoke hearts at the back of your cupboard. Certainly, it's an achievement few could match. But most cooks are aware that if you chuck too much on the plate and pile dish after dish on the table, the result is oppressive instead of pleasurable. There are only so many ways you can cook a cabbage, and only so much one diner can digest at a single sitting.

If this was an artist too young to remember All Things Must Pass or The Yes Album you could perhaps forgive such self-indulgence - but Tom Waits is of a generation that endured the full six sides of both. And while it's easy to sneer at soft targets like prog rock and the excesses of the seventies, even classic triples like Sandinista or 69 Love Songs would have been better condensed into a single 70-minute epic rather than sprawling across three CDs.

Apologists sometimes claim that triple albums give fans extra value for money, but I disagree. Value for money is Sergeant Pepper, Innervisions, Thriller, OK Computer or Original Pirate Material. It's inspired artists focussing on their very best material and producing an outstanding fifty minutes that bears repeated listening over many years. For me at least, earlier Waits albums like Swordfishtrombone and Bone Machine fell effortlessly into this category.

A bloated album like Orphans is generally the mark of a bloated fanbase: an audience so devoted and uncritical that all artistic restraint has flown out the window. If enough people lap up every line you write and pore over the smallest detail, the temptation to serve up second and third helpings must be overwhelming. What we're talking about here is JK Rowling syndrome.

Harry Potter needed only 190 pages to find the Philosopher's Stone, yet his quest for the Half Blood Prince has taken a whopping 652 - leaving Stephen Fry with a sore throat and my kids lugging a hardback brick around the house. But who's to tell Rowling how badly her recent books needed the blue pencil? What - so they might have sold a bit better?

Okay, JK and TW aren't for everybody, but both are expert at delivering what their audiences want. Overlong? Self-indulgent? They should worry. Orphans has already garnered long, solemn columns in the broadsheets, endless debate in the blogosphere and any future tour will sell out as many shows as its author is willing to play. The critics are as relentlessly uncritical as ever.

But what's the music actually like? Ah. I was afraid you'd ask.

CD 1 was on my kitchen stereo all weekend - with much hilarity from other members of the household asking if I was alright as the usual Waits staple of shrieks, clanks, crashes and groans reverberated up the stairwell. One track - The Road To Peace - did stand out as genuinely startling, while a couple of others were reasonably listenable. But mostly it was Waits recycling Waits: a succession of threadbare blues riffs, scrapyard percussion and gruff shouting that teetered constantly on the verge of self-parody.

I've now made it most of the way through CD 2, and enjoyed a succession of pleasant ballads and nicely crafted tunes in a traditional vein. The current single Long Way Home is as good as anything Waits has produced in the past ten years. But you know what? Track 35 has just started - the 18th hoarse folksy ballad in a row - and I'm losing the will to live. I like Tom Waits as much as I like smoked salmon. But my dad once sent an entire side of the stuff for Christmas and we ended up feeding it to the cats.

Sod record reviewing. The NME once summed up Tom Waits in just four words - "Junkyard noise blues crooner". If you like his music no doubt you'll buy Orphans next Monday despite my curmudgeonly mutterings - and if you don't, no words of mine will change your mind. As to my copy, it's coming in to work with me tonight to be given away on air to some lucky listener.